Volta

Bad news for those planning to do anything other than look at art this week: Your week is fucked. It’s Armory Week, which for art professionals and lovers alike means a marathon of art-viewing practically guaranteed to hurt your eyes at some point. There’s treatment for these kinds of injuries, but the best advice we can offer is to simply be careful out there.

It’s fair week, which means you can expect a flurry of posts nominally about art, and largely about who’s selling what. Before anyone gets to that, though, you’ll need to know to where to go to buy your art (or like the rest of us rabble, look at it with awe and wonder). This list will help you get where you’re going.

Even though the hum around Armory week seems subdued this year, visiting half-a-dozen-plus art fairs can in a few days’ time can feel like a week on a Eurail pass. Naive outsiders are treated harshly, the food is unfamiliar and overpriced, and you spend a lot of time snooping around taking pictures. It’s useful to have an index that you can depend on to guide you towards the things that are worth seeing and away from the things that aren’t. A guidebook if you will. Here’s ours.

Get ready for non-stop art viewing. If you like art at all, next week's schedule should be packed with art fairs, biennial viewings, and openings. If you don't know where to start, we're here to help. Our one sentence synopsis as follows: This year more elitists, more protests, more video art, more foreigners, and continued efforts to disguise art fairs as nightclubs.